COSI – A Road Trip to Columbus

A few Saturday’s ago, we loaded up the car and headed to Columbus to go to COSI (Center of Science and Industry). Here’s a typical trip to COSI for my family…..

No matter how hard we try, we never leave our house much before 9:30 – 10 am. This puts us in Columbus right at lunch time. We drive straight to COSI and then we drive past it and grab lunch at the White Castles a few miles down the road. (A side bar. Yes, my kids love White Castle over most any other fast food restaurant. Odd, I know. But, hey, it’s inexpensive and quick! )

After fueling up on food, we head to COSI and park – parking is $5 and it’s safe and easy. When you enter the Museum, you get in line to purchase your tickets. If you are a member of the Cincinnati Museum Center, you can actually go to COSI for free through the ATSC program. This is a great perk! so be sure to check your wallet before you leave Cincinnati to make sure that if you are a member of the CMC that you bring your card with you.

Whenever we go, we have to make a bee-line directly to the Gadgets part of COSI to see if there are any special things going on. Gadgets is exactly what it sounds like – this is where the robots are and lots of other electronic like things (I’m not gadget lingo savvy, my friends). The Gadgets area has a “cafe” where you can sign up your family to do easy experiments or take apart computers. This is what my kids want to do every time. They love to take apart computers (who knew?) and me and my husband think it’s fun as well. We get to unscrew it and bash it up and see what’s inside. This normally takes the better part of an hour.

After heading out of Gadgets, we normally head over to the Progress area – “Learn About our Future from Our Past”. You start out in a town dated 1898 and then when you turn a corner, you’re in the same town in 1962. We love to see do a compare and contrast with the kids to see how much they were paying attention. Once finished in this part of COSI, we then just wander around and see what’s happening.

The nice thing about our visit this time was that it was actually warm enough to go the outside exhibit area called “Big Science Park” where you can lift a car, play with air pressure, see a pod home and whisper across the park to see if someone can hear you on the other side. Once we had some fresh air in us, we headed back inside to check out the Geckos Exhibit – Tails to Toepads.

This was so neat! My 6 year old son was adamant that he was not going to go look at the geckos, but after a bit of cajoling and um, shall we say dragging, he, like the rest of us, was mesmerized with looking at the live geckos on exhibit. We studied the different pads, colorings, textures, sizes and on an on. This was really well done and made the experience of learning more about geckos exciting for all ages. In fact, we went through the exhibit twice to make sure we didn’t miss anything.

By the time we’d finished having our fill of geckos, we spent the next few hours just wandering around COSI checking out the Ocean area and we stopped to listen to the kids who walk around performing experiments throughout COSI.

We stayed for about four hours, which for my kids, at 6 and 8 is just about as long as they can handle without some sort of meltdown. There’s always so much going on at COSI and every time just as we’re leaving, we see something else we wished we’d had more time to explore. This gives us something to look forward to on our next trip.

As we left, my oldest talked about how she hopes that the next time we go, that she’ll be tall enough to ride the high wire unicyle that’s goes across part of the lobby. We also noticed a big poster of the next traveling exhibit for this Summer. If your kids like dinosaurs, this will be something you’ll want to take the time to come and see what it’s all about.

I want to disclose that I did receive free tickets from COSI for this visit. Thanks, COSI!